title: One-year follow-up of patients undergoing elective cardiac surgery assessed with the Comprehensive Assessment of Frailty test and its simplified form.
abstract: Assessment of perioperative risk of elderly patients in cardiac surgery is demanding. Most of the commonly used cardiac surgery risk scores over-or underestimate individual risk. Therefore, we recently developed a 'frailty score', the comprehensive assessment of frailty (CAF) score that showed a good prediction of 30-day mortality. The aim of the study was to evaluate the ability of the new score predicting one-year outcome. CAF was preoperatively applied to 400 patients ≥ 74 years that were admitted to cardiac surgery between September 2008 and January 2010. For 213 of these patients one-year follow-up was assessed by telephone interview until April 2010. One hundred and ten male and 103 female patients were included. Twenty-five percent underwent isolated coronary revascularization, 35% isolated valve procedures and 26% underwent combined procedures. One-year mortality was 12.2%. Patients who died within one year had a median frailty score of 16 [5;33] compared to 11 [3;33] to the one-year survivors (P=0.001). A new, easily applicable score ('Frailty predicts death One yeaR after Elective Cardiac Surgery Test') was built out of the basic score and showed a promising ability to predict one-year mortality. CAF is a new additional tool to assess prognosis of elderly patients before cardiac surgical interventions. The 'CAF' score facilitates prediction of mid-term outcome of high-risk elderly patients.
authors.affiliation: Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, University Hospital Zürich, Rämistrasse 100, 8091 Zürich, Switzerland. simon.suendermann@usz.ch
authors.forename: Simon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sündermann
authors.forename: Anika
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Dademasch
authors.forename: Ardawan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Rastan
authors.forename: Julian
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Praetorius
authors.forename: Héctor
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Rodriguez
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Walther
authors.forename: Friedrich-Wilhelm
authors.initials: FW
authors.lastname: Mohr
authors.forename: Volkmar
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Falk
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D006348:Cardiac Surgical Procedures / Q000379:methods* / Q000401:mortality; D017558:Elective Surgical Procedures / Q000379:methods* / Q000401:mortality; D005260:Female; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D016330:Frail Elderly; D005858:Germany / Q000453:epidemiology; D006331:Heart Diseases / Q000401:mortality / Q000601:surgery*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011379:Prognosis; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D018570:Risk Assessment / Q000379:methods*; D015996:Survival Rate / Q000639:trends; D013997:Time Factors